


Skeins

by languageintostillair



Series: Strings [3]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Past Cersei Lannister/Jaime Lannister, and a little bit of dealing with past traumas and present anxieties, just a couple of vague references to it, the softest possible sequel to a colleagues-with-benefits-with-feelings situation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:53:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27643724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/languageintostillair/pseuds/languageintostillair
Summary: There’s an irony in their clumsiness with words, considering they’re two people who write for a living. Although, come to think of it, they’ve never had a problem talking about their work. Even in bed, where their vocabulary is decidedly more limited, they rarely ever experience a breakdown in communication. But this? Dating? Small talk? Apprehensions, and vulnerabilities? They are so new to putting these things into words. To putting words into these things.(Or, five times Jaime and Brienne talk about words, and the one time they don’t. A sequel toStrings/Knots.)
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Series: Strings [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1980535
Comments: 38
Kudos: 158





	Skeins

**Author's Note:**

> In this house we do not speak about my ‘hiatus’.

* * *

**【1】**

“This is weird,” Brienne says, lifting her cup of coffee to her lips. They have a table outdoors at the café she’d suggested this morning—a quaint place that was able to accommodate them after a bearable fifteen-minute wait—and Jaime was just wondering how much her freckles would darken if they weren’t seated under the awning.

“Is it?” he replies, poking at his remaining poached egg, the prong of his fork threatening to puncture the thin white membrane. “We’ve had lots of meals together. Granted,” he gestures the fork at her, “those all happened before we’d seen each other naked.”

This observation earns him a swift blow to his shin. “Seven hells,” he hisses, reaching beneath the table to rub his leg. “Is this going to be a regular occurrence, because I might have to reconsider—”

She ignores his question. “Will you—not mention that in public?”

“We’re on a date,” he points out. “People can reasonably assume we’ve fucked.”

“Jaime!” Brienne exclaims, even redder now than she’d been a few seconds ago. The couple seated at the next table go quiet, and clear their throats.

“I’m just saying—”

“You don’t have to. Say anything.”

“We’ll continue this meal in silence, then,” he huffs. “Like we’ve been doing for the past twenty minutes.”

“So it _is_ weird.”

He shrugs. “Anything new is usually pretty weird.”

She nods slowly, her knife rolling a raspberry across the surface of her pancake. “I haven’t been on many dates.”

“Me neither. Not in a… traditional sense.”

The raspberry pauses. He shouldn’t have said that. He hopes she isn’t thinking of Cersei—he hopes she isn’t thinking that _he’s_ thinking of Cersei. He should distract her with:

“Your first date with Hyle Hunt—was that weird too?”

That was _not_ how he meant to distract her.

“Jaime.” She meets his eyes. “I thought we were over this.”

“We didn’t exactly—” he nudges her knee with his— “ _talk_ about it.”

She brings her coffee to her mouth again. “No,” she murmurs, and there’s a different shade to her blush now. “We didn’t… talk.”

He’s tempted to suggest revisiting that _talk_ later, then thinks better of it. But he does let his lips curl upwards, and Brienne’s lips do the same, just so, just at the rim of her cup. They’ll revisit it, he thinks, in a way that won’t leave a bitter taste in his mouth afterwards. Brienne will stay, after; she’ll let him rip her bra from her chest and her panties from her hips, the way he’d wanted to that night, but didn’t. She’ll scold him, maybe, for ruining her things, but she won’t mean it. He’ll buy as many sensible bras and panties as she wants to make up for it—or none at all, so he can have her just the way he likes.

“Just now,” she says quietly, interrupting his thoughts of her naked and astride him, “you said—people would assume we’re on a date.”

“I believe I said, people can assume that we’ve—”

He feels a blow to his shin again, though it’s gentler this time. “Yes, that,” she whispers. “But I mean—do you think we—look like it? Like we’re on a date?”

There it is again. That… worry. It reminds him of— _you once told me I was much uglier in daylight._ Jaime has the vague inclination to turn to the couple next to them—who’ve tentatively restarted their conversation—and ask what they’d thought before they’d overheard his declaration. _Excuse me, by any chance, did you assume that the two of us…?_ But Brienne would be embarrassed, and annoyed, and as much as he’s enjoyed embarrassing and annoying her in the past, he doesn’t want to do so now. Instead, he reaches across the table for her hand, the one still gripping the knife. That’s what people do on dates, isn’t it? Hold each other’s hands?

“What are you—” she starts, then stops. She releases the knife, and lets him slip his fingers into her palm. She flinches, a little, but that is to be expected; Brienne flinches at most things she isn’t used to. What he’s learned is this: when she flinches at first, then relaxes later, _it means something_. Something deep, and precious, and good. That tiny jolt through her flesh, that softening after—

_This bothers me._

_But I trust you._

He runs his thumb over the ridges of her knuckles. There is, delightfully, no slenderness to her hands. Only solidity.

“Now there isn’t any doubt,” he says. “If anyone cares to look.”

She curls her fingers ever so slightly around his, and offers no other reply. But this is a good silence, now; this is how their bodies speak. There’s an irony in their clumsiness with words, considering they’re two people who write for a living. Although, come to think of it, they’ve never had a problem talking about their work. Even in bed, where their vocabulary is decidedly more limited, they rarely ever experience a breakdown in communication. But this? Dating? Small talk? Apprehensions, and vulnerabilities? They are so new to putting these things into words. To putting words into these things.

_Anything new is usually pretty weird_ , he’d told Brienne just now.

They’re on the way back to her apartment, their weird brunch a ten-minute walk behind them. The food had been pretty good, as she’d promised; unassuming, and more satisfying because of it. It was a shame that they’d fumbled their way through their conversation. But Jaime had held her hand at least—in broad daylight, no less, even if she’s tucking her hands into her pockets as they stroll down the street now—and besides, there’ll be other opportunities.

Practice makes perfect, right?

He’s nervous about visiting her home for the first time. Probably not as nervous as she is, but he’s nervous nonetheless. He’s seen her, _been with her_ completely naked—two or more times a week for the past few months—and now he’s nervous about _this._ Not that he thinks it’ll change anything about anything, but Brienne has kept her home a secret for so long that its mystery seems so much like an unequivocal truth. In a few minutes, they will tear the veil from this truth, and there’s a lump in his throat because of it.

When they finally step through her door, though, it doesn’t feel like any kind of great reveal. In fact, it dawns on him that it’s exactly what he expected her apartment to look like.

“It’s very… _Brienne_ ,” he tells her.

She locks the door behind them. “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

“An observation.”

He looks around at the mix of simple and salvaged furniture in this snug one-bedroom apartment. A sturdy wooden dining table, where her laptop sits, fully charged; three filled bookshelves, each of a different size and design, yet somehow making sense together; a navy blue couch, with one of its seats—Brienne’s favoured, he deduces—more sunken in than the other; her small kitchen, neat, not heavily used, but clearly used enough to keep her going; a modest vase on her coffee table, filled with flowers, a small indulgence that she allows herself.

“Very practical,” he elaborates. “But… warm.”

“I should put that on my dating profile,” she says with a forced laugh.

“Do you have one?” He’d deleted his dating app after three days, even before his second time with Brienne—which was the first time he’d asked her to **come over**. He hadn’t put much thought into his bio then. _Just here because the woman I enjoyed fucking once might not fuck me again_ , it might as well have said.

“No,” she answers, walking towards the kitchen. “Water?”

“No, thank you. Sex?”

She snorts. “You didn’t even let me give you the tour.”

“Sex can be the tour. We can fuck here—” he points at her couch— “or here—” he points at her dining table— “or, I assume, through there.”

He is pointing at a closed door now, one of two.

“That’s the bathroom,” Brienne says, rolling her eyes.

“We can fuck in the bathroom. Why _haven’t_ we fucked in a bathroom? We should fuck in your bathroom.”

“Will you—” She sighs affectionately—he _hopes_ it’s affectionate—and leans against the kitchen counter. “Do you have to be so… crude?”

“Shower sex isn’t—”

“Not _that_.”

“What? Wait—you mean, ‘fucking’?”

She turns to open a cabinet, and takes out a glass. “Forget it.”

“You say it as much as I do,” he says, pulling out a chair from the dining table and settling in it sideways. “ _Fuck me, Jaime_ , and all that.”

“That’s…” Brienne walks over to the fridge, opens the door, and removes a pitcher of water. “That’s in the moment. What else can I say?”

“So what would you prefer that _I_ say?”

“I’m not saying you _can’t_ say it.” She fills her glass halfway. “I just… I don’t know. I wish there was a better word for it.”

“It’s not a _bad_ word. It’s versatile. And does the job in one syllable.”

One sip. “You know—sometimes we… fuck. But sometimes, it feels like something else.”

He runs a finger over the back of the chair. “You mean, like that Sunday…?”

“Yeah. Like that Sunday.” Pink tints her cheeks, and she swallows though she hadn’t taken another sip of her water. “I suppose I mean—sometimes I’d like to… to fuck. To fuck you, or—or be fucked by you. But—if we’re—now that we’re—”

“Dating,” he offers.

“Yes. I’d like a—a different word, or phrase for it.” She laughs, a little helplessly. “Is this an occupational hazard?”

Jaime smiles. He likes her this way, this questioning, quivering, shimmering version of her. The woman who asks if they look like they’re on a date, who asks if there’s another way to describe what happens when their bodies come together. Who tears up and tells him she’s all tangled up about him. “Our options aren’t great, I have to agree.”

“They’re too direct. Or too casual. Or too… euphemistic.”

She isn’t one for euphemisms, he thinks. Probably despises their inauthenticity. He waves her over, and she sets her glass down on the counter, walks towards him. As she approaches, he catches her by the waist. “We’ll play a game,” he says, bringing her between his thighs. “A word game—synonyms. I started us off, so now it’s your turn.”

Hesitantly, she puts her hands on his shoulders. “Having sex, to start. Accurate, but dry. Clinical, almost.”

“Sleeping together.” He wraps his arms a little tighter around her. “Cosy, but feels a little bit like a lie.”

“A lie?”

“We haven’t actually done a lot of _sleeping_ with each other. Apart from last night.”

“Fair point. Intercourse?”

Jaime barks out a laugh. “That one’s indefensible. Very unsexy.”

“You don’t want to have _intercourse_ with me?” she teases. “Not here—” she lifts a finger towards the dining table, “or there—” she points behind her at the couch, “or in there?”

Now she’s pointing at the bathroom door. He likes her this way too—she is playful, and comfortable, and they are not weird and quiet like they were at brunch. It is something like how she was over the phone during those nights when he was in Dorne, or on that Sunday afternoon once she’d relaxed. On her back, his fingers slip beneath her shirt to draw circles on her skin, and he doesn’t miss how she shivers at his touch.

“It does put a bit of a damper on things,” he says, remembering to comment on ‘intercourse’.

“Quite a bit.”

“How about: banging?”

“Hmm. Worse than ‘fucking’, yet somehow not as good. Hooking up?”

“Too vague.” He grins as he thinks of another word. “ _Fornicating._ ”

“What century is this?” she laughs, and pushes herself from his arms. “Getting laid,” she says, backing towards her couch.

“Getting some.”

“Getting lucky?”

He wiggles his eyebrows. “Getting it on.”

“Getting _tired_ ,” she giggles, as she collapses on the seat that’s more sunken in.

He’s too distracted by that giggle to consider that maybe, just maybe, he shouldn’t say:

“Making love.”

_Shit._ It’s too soon. It was only yesterday night that they were on the verge of ending things, that he was on his knees trying to convince Brienne to give them a chance. Now he’s saying words like _that_?

She isn’t responding in the way he’d thought she would, though. No wide eyes, no sputtering, no changing the subject. Instead, she’s wrinkling her nose in a sort of… disgust?

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. I just—I hate the phrase. I can’t imagine asking you to… do that. To me.”

“Too euphemistic?” he asks, thinking of her comment earlier.

“I guess?” She leans her head back, and gazes up to the ceiling. “It also puts a lot of… pressure on the act. Like it has to live up to, or work up to something.”

“It didn’t use to mean ‘sex’, you know. Not very long ago, it just meant something like courtship.”

“I know. And that’s a lot of pressure to put on some flowers, or poetry, or whatever. The idea that they could _make_ …”

She trails off, and Jaime’s eyes travel to the vase of flowers on her coffee table. “Is that… something you want? Flowers, and poetry?”

“Not really,” she shrugs. “I wouldn’t know what to do with things like that.”

Briefly, he sees a shadow cross her face, then disappear. There’s a story there, and he’ll have to ask her about it at some other time. As he stands from his seat and moves to join her on the couch, he wonders what gifts he could offer to someone like Brienne—books, maybe, besides any underwear to replace the ones he might ruin in future.

“It’s interesting,” she muses, turning her head from the ceiling to look at him. “How definitions can change in such a short time. How the boundaries shift.”

“Mm.” He’s right in front of her now, and knocks his knees gently into hers. “Language can be so… malleable. What things mean… and what words work best… that can all change within just a few months.”

“A few months…?” she frowns. Then, her brow softens with realisation, and she lets out a soft _oh_.

He leans down to capture her lips with his, thinks of things spoken and unspoken, of saying _no strings_ and meaning exactly the opposite, of how the word ‘fuck’ isn’t enough for them anymore.

“Yeah,” he murmurs. “Oh.”

* * *

**【2】**

Jaime is staring at her.

Well, Jaime is always staring at her these days. He says it’s because he didn’t think he could, before three weeks ago—‘staring’ is ‘string’ with an ‘a’, he’d joked when they were working late at his apartment one night, and they’d said no strings—and now he’s making up for lost time. That joke, if it could be called one, had made her sigh and drop her head to her keyboard. Still, she couldn’t help but smile to herself even as she did. Jaime could be silly, she’s realised, in a way that he’d never been until fairly recently. Sometimes he seems almost sheepish about it, like he thinks that he really _shouldn’t_ , and she hadn’t thought Jaime could be sheepish about anything. It makes her wonder if he can be silly with anyone else besides her. She can’t imagine that Tywin or Cersei would be very tolerant of silliness, but perhaps Tyrion might welcome it. Her encounters with Jaime’s brother—all during their investigation into Sansa Stark’s disappearance—were too brief and too serious for her to make any judgments either way. Jaime wants them to meet properly, though, her and Tyrion, so she’ll probably find out soon.

Anyway, Jaime is staring. Brienne is used to it happening before, during, and after sex, but it’s the rest of it that unsettles her: in the office, or over meals, or first thing in the morning like he still can’t quite believe she stayed. Staring that isn’t hungry, or even appreciative, or for any of the reasons people have stared at her all her life. It was something more like… getting lost in her. _Her_. She hasn’t quite figured out a way to cope with this knowledge.

But this afternoon is different. They’re just waking up from a long nap—their schedules actually allowed for one this Sunday, and she feels so lucky to be able to enjoy it in Jaime’s bed—and she’d turned onto her side to meet his eyes, only to find him already staring. Staring _differently_. As if… as if he’s just had some kind of revelation.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asks.

“Can I tell you a secret?”

“Another one?” Not that she minds, but she’s still groggy from her nap, and she isn’t sure how she’ll respond to a secret on par with the others.

“Another—oh. No, not _that_ kind of secret. Just a small one.”

“Yeah.” She rubs her eyes, and holds back a yawn. “Sure.”

He leans in close, so that their noses almost touch, and whispers: “You’re my very first girlfriend.”

“What?” she says, with a puzzled laugh.

“You’re my very first girlfriend,” he repeats, proudly.

She isn’t surprised by this, to be fair—she’d gathered as much from things Jaime had said, like how he hadn’t dated much even after things had soured with Cersei—but she knew it in this amorphous way, like a thick fog that she didn’t feel particularly inclined to penetrate. To have it stated so clearly like this, so matter-of-factly…

“It took you three weeks to figure this out?” she replies, hoping to the Seven that she sounds nonchalant about it.

“Ha!” He pokes her in her belly. “So you’ve been thinking of me as your boyfriend for three weeks!”

She doesn’t know why he’s saying that like he’s _tricked_ her into something. Worse still, it’s actually making her feel _defensive_. “I—well—you were the one who was all, ‘let’s get tangled up in each other’!”

“Sure, but I thought you’d be more… I don’t know, _reticent_ about it. About labels.”

“Maybe I just wanted to check off that box for myself,” she says, glancing up at the ceiling.

“Oh really?” Jaime purrs, and she feels a tug on the elastic of her panties beneath the covers, which snaps back into place against the skin of her hip. “Am I your _very first boyfriend_ , Brienne Tarth?”

He must know this; he just wants her to say it. She tugs on his waistband too, though it doesn’t feel quite so satisfying when it’s just sweatpants and not underwear. “So what if you are?”

“Really? Not even a brief fling in your past?”

So maybe he doesn’t know it. There’s a vague, Renly-shaped silhouette in her mind that won’t quite materialise, and then there’s—

No. She won’t think of it, much less bring it up. Bad enough she works with him; really bad that she’d dated him again; really, _really_ bad that she’d told Jaime about it, even though the sex was really, _really_ good after.

“Nothing worth talking about,” she says in the end, which isn’t a lie. “You’re my very first boyfriend, at age twenty-nine.”

“And I’m forty, so—” Jaime stops, and frowns. “Did you say twenty- _nine_?”

“… Yes?”

“Aren’t you—did you turn twenty-nine recently?”

“A couple of months ago…?”

His frown deepens. “Why didn’t you tell me it was your nameday?”

“Why would I have told you?”

“I don’t know. We were…”

“No strings,” she reminds him. No boyfriends, or girlfriends, not back then.

“Right,” he winces. “Well. I still wish we could have celebrated.”

Her face warms.

“ _Oh_ ,” Jaime smirks, raising a hand to her cheek and running a thumb over it. “We _did_ celebrate.”

“Maybe.” Maybe she treated herself to a **can I come over?** on her nameday, the way she treated herself to thinking of Jaime as her boyfriend for the past three weeks, even though they hadn’t really discussed it.

“I’m honoured. I hope it was a good night.”

Her face is _burning_. “… It might have been.”

“Interesting.” The hand that was on her cheek slides down to her neck, and traces the collar of her t-shirt. “What did we do?”

“I mean—the usual.”

“There were some nights that were… less _usual_ … than others.”

She sighs. “You’re not going to let this go, are you?”

He tucks a finger into her collar. “Never.”

“Alright.” She takes a breath. “Well—you were—” Gods, she’s never had to describe what they do, not like this. It had taken her long enough to learn how to tell him what she wants in the moment—to learn enough about her body, and his body with her body, to be able to know in the first place—and now he’s asking her for this? “It was—I was on my… And you were behind—” _Seven hells._ “I asked you to—”

“Oh,” he interjects. “I think I remember.”

“You remember?” How could he possibly—

He takes his hand from her clavicle, and points above them to his headboard. “You were holding onto that. And you were on your knees. Was that the night?”

She gives him a slow, slightly sceptical nod.

A half-smile in return. “I remember.”

“How?” she asks, already afraid of the answer. “Or—why? It wasn’t the first time we’d—”

“No. But I was surprised by something, I think. Something about you.”

“Now I’m concerned,” she laughs nervously.

“It wasn’t anything _bad_.” Without her realising, Jaime had moved his hand down to the hem of her shirt. “I can… show you, if you like,” he says, fingering the cotton at her waist.

There isn’t anything she can do but nod again, and sit up with him, and let him lift her shirt over her head. Already, it is different—it’s the afternoon, she’s starting off wearing much less than she was wearing that night—but already, it is the same. Already, she’s transported back to that night, and how she’d allowed herself to be selfish on her nameday. The other times she’d asked Jaime if she could **come over** , there was always a reason beyond her own desire: stress relief; or to take her mind off some work she wanted to return fresh to later; or, if she goes back to the first time, because she’d told Hyle there wasn’t someone else when there was. On her nameday, though, she’d asked purely because she _wanted_ to. Because some part of her thought that she deserved a little fun.

_Fun_. That’s a funny word to describe those nights she had with Jaime. To be honest, she doesn’t think they really had _fun_ till the Sunday he came back from Dorne. That feeling didn’t last, and didn’t come back until she’d invited him over to her apartment two weeks later. They’ve had fun since then, of course, but before that…

That night, she’d asked him to take her from behind. It wasn’t something Jaime gravitated towards in general—nor her—but something inside her told her to ask. Naked, she’d knelt in the middle of his bed, just like she’s doing now. Jaime was, and is, naked too, and before she’d had the chance to lean forward, he’d wrapped his arms around her, put his lips to her neck, inhaled. He is doing so now, so he does remember. He is holding her breasts in his palms, then sliding one palm down her body, towards her navel, his fingers reaching between her thighs and stroking the hair there. His cock is half-hard, pressed behind her just as it had been that night, and her cheek is against his cheek, relishing the friction of his beard against her bare skin. He is making slow circles around her clit now, slow enough that she isn’t losing control yet, but she lets herself throw her head back against his shoulder as if she is.

“This was what I noticed at first,” he says into her neck.

“Hmm?”

“The way you… moved. Something about it was different.”

“Different how?”

“Like—like you were letting yourself let go.”

She’s enjoying this too much to dispute his words, though she might pick them apart with him later. He is harder now, almost hard enough, and she pushes back against him even more and he laughs. He hadn’t laughed that night. He’d hissed, and she’d reached behind her to grab for the length of him, and by some miracle she’d managed it, tended to him that way. She isn’t managing now; instead she’s grappling for him, and they are laughing some more, and she’s trying to help him on but she’s failing, and it’s not like that night at all. Until it _is_ : he is sinking back and down a little, and she knows what’s coming next. It had taken some manoeuvring, but he’d entered her then, surprising her, delighting her. She can’t be surprised now, of course, but it feels just as good, and just like that night she falls forward, steadies herself with one hand on the bed and the other catching the headboard. Both hands will be on the headboard soon enough, and in the meantime Jaime is adjusting himself too, trying to find the angle he’d found that night, and _ah—right there_ —and then he’s digging his fingers into the flesh of her hips, and _yes_ , she remembers that night so well. She remembers how she’d remembered it for so many nights after that. Her twenty-ninth nameday, and how her back had arched, her neck too, as she’d gripped the headboard until her knuckles turned white and—

“There— _ah_ —” and Jaime leans forward a little, snakes one hand from her hip to her belly to her breast. “This—like you—”

“I said you could—”

“Yes—I—”

And his hand leaves her breast, travels round her ribs and up her shoulder blade, then his fingers weave into her hair and gently—or not at all—he pulls. Not enough to hurt, Jaime would never, but just enough to make her back arch just that little bit more, which changes the angle of his hips driving into hers, and _oh_ , it’s the depth and the speed of each stroke, the intersection of her cunt and his cock, the flesh of their thighs meeting and parting and meeting again, in time with their cries and their breaths and their moans and their whimpers, and _gods, yes_ , they had celebrated, even if Jaime didn’t realise it at the time. They are celebrating now to make up for it.

Afterwards, Jaime reclines across the foot of the bed, while she is curled, foetal, her back against the pillows. She is staring at him, the way she didn’t think she could until three weeks ago, her eyes following the pathways of every muscle on his body.

“I think… it was because you didn’t have to see me,” he says.

Her eyes meet his.

“I mean—I didn’t think you _didn’t_ want to. But I think you liked not having to… to see the way I look at you.”

“Mm.” She remembers this part now. How freeing it felt; how she could let herself go, like Jaime said. She didn’t have to see him, which meant she didn’t have to think about how she was seen by him. That was how she’d spent her twenty-ninth nameday—not having to see that she was being seen; feeling so _wanted_ by Jaime. How turning away from him made feeling wanted feel so much _better_.

“Was it the same today?” he asks, and she shakes her head.

“It’s different, now.”

“How so?”

“I think… maybe I’m getting better. Better at being wanted, and all the things that come with it.”

(Things like being stared at: in the office, and over meals, and in the mornings like he still can’t quite believe she stayed. Things like being seen, and wanting to be.)

“So.” Jaime picks at the sheets between them. “Whenever you ask for—what you asked for. Will it still mean…”

“It might,” she tells him honestly. “Sometimes.”

“And other times?”

She uncurls herself, stretches her feet off the side of the bed. “I guess the other times…” she says, looking at her toes. “Maybe those can just be—you know. For fun.”

Something shifts on the bed, and when she looks up Jaime’s _rolling_ over to her; she laughs and feels so lucky to be in his bed this afternoon.

“Happy belated nameday,” he says, when they are face to face again.

With a kiss, she thanks him.

* * *

**【3】**

Brienne is mad at him for something. At least, he _thinks_ she is. She’s not ignoring him, not exactly, and she hasn’t screamed at him or thrown things or done any of the bullshit Cersei used to do when she got mad. But Jaime thinks Brienne is mad, or—or _something_. They haven’t had many opportunities to interact in the office, but her texts have been shorter and less frequent for the past two days, and even though she’d come over to his place tonight, she was… distant. He hadn’t been able to get anything more than a faint smile out of her, and the sex was—it was—

Alright. The sex was bad. It’s _never_ bad. It’s been average, sure, or perfunctory—an itch, scratched—but it’s never _bad_. Not until tonight. It was bad because Brienne didn’t seem to enjoy it at all, which meant Jaime couldn’t enjoy it at all, and then _she hadn’t even come_. She _always_ comes. When he’d asked her to let him help her, she’d _declined_ , and then she _left_.

He thought they were over that part.

She’s just texted him now. **I’m home** , his phone says.

**Good** , he begins, then ponders what to send next. He decides on: **Did I do something? Are you mad at me?**

She types, and types, and types. **No** , is what she ends up sending. Just **No**. Which question is that supposed to be an answer to?

He calls her immediately. The phone rings for far too long considering she’d just sent that text.

“I did something,” he says when she picks up.

“Jaime—”

“I’ll fix it. But you’ll have to tell me what it is so I can fix it.”

“It’s not something for you to _fix_. It’s—I just—I need a night away, that’s all.”

“Will you talk to me? You can talk to me, you know that, right?”

_We’ll talk and we’ll fuck and it’ll always be better in the morning._ That’s what he’d promised her. But they hadn’t talked, and then they’d fucked badly, so that only makes everything worse.

“I know, I’m just—I’m not ready to,” she says. “But it isn’t—I just need one night, Jaime. Okay?”

“Okay.” It’s the last word that he would use to describe what he’s feeling right now. “Will I see you in the office tomorrow?”

“I’ve got that interview to do in Duskendale, remember? And then the archives—”

“Oh, right.” He won’t be in the office much himself. “And you said you’ll be back at—”

“I don’t know. Five, at the earliest.”

“Can I come over?” _Sounds familiar._ “When I’m done with my day?”

A few seconds of silence, then: “Sure.”

He is done with his day around four. Well, he isn’t _done_ , but the rest of the things he needs to do can be put off till later tonight. Brienne had texted to say she should be back home by five thirty, which means he’s waiting in his car outside her apartment building by four thirty, the driver’s side window opened a crack, the seat adjusted back. He’s exhausted. He’d spent half the night wracking his brain about what he could possibly have done, and the other half trying not to wrack his brain at all, and now his eyelids are drooping—

He hears knocking from somewhere. Somewhere near, right beside him. Where is he? In his car, the driver’s side window opened a crack, the seat adjusted back. The knocking—

“Jaime,” he hears, and he turns his head to the right to see Brienne standing on the other side of his car door. He sits up, opens the door, and clambers out.

“Hey. Sorry.” He locks his car. “How was Duskendale?”

“Fine. How long have you been waiting here?”

He looks at his watch. Just after six. “An hour and a half,” he replies, as they start walking to the main entrance.

“Oh. Sorry you had to—”

“Don’t apologise. I was early.”

“I was late, too.” She pauses. “I should—I should give you my spare key. You could have—”

He stops walking, and so does she. “Really?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

He’d already given her the spare key to his place, partly because she’s over there so often that it just seemed more convenient for her to have one. He hadn’t expected her to offer him hers, though, especially not when—

“But you’re—you’re mad at me.”

“I’m not mad at you,” she frowns. “I just—needed to deal with something. On my own.” Then, she sighs. “Can we talk upstairs?”

“So you’ll talk.” He’s exhausted, too exhausted to keep the bitterness out of his voice, and Brienne is looking at him like she’s only just realising how much she’d tortured him.

“Jaime,” she says, bringing a hand to his cheek. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to…”

He lifts his hand to hers, and takes it.

Upstairs, Brienne heads to her bedroom to change. She doesn’t object when he follows her, so he lingers by the bed as she unbuttons her shirt. The moment she’s down to just her underwear, something in him—desire, yes, but something else too—tells him to approach her, to steer her so that her back is against the wall.

“What are you doing?” she whispers, and he drops to his knees in reply. If she protests, it is only weakly, and he pretends not to hear it. He pulls her panties down to her ankles, leans in towards her, breathes her in. She hadn’t come last night. She’ll come now. She must.

Later, her legs still shaking on either side of him and his mouth thick with the taste of her, he almost loses his balance as he sits back on the floor.

“You—” she exhales, steps out of her panties and towards him. She gestures a limp hand to where his cock strains against his jeans. “I should—”

He shakes his head. Some odd feeling is overcoming him, some memory he’d thought long buried, and he has to grip her ankle to steady himself. There is no slenderness; only solidity. _Brienne_. Not—

“Hey. Jaime.” Her ankle is no longer in his hand, because she’s beside him on the floor. “Jaime, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just—” He doesn’t want to bring Cersei into this. Cersei doesn’t belong in this room, in his head, not the Cersei he’d left years ago. “Nothing.”

“This isn’t nothing.” _Brienne. Brienne only_. “Jaime—”

“I used to—” he grabs for Brienne’s arm— “this is what I—I’d do this. When she was mad. And then she would—” _Fuck._ He should stop here, he’s making it sound like— “It’s nothing. I’m sorry. We don’t have to—”

“It’s okay,” he hears, and then a kiss to his temple. And then another, and another, and another. And then an unbuttoning, an unzipping, a reaching into. Her fingers. Her fingers around him. _I wouldn’t_ , they seem to say. _She would, but I wouldn’t._

_I wouldn’t take without giving in return._

It isn’t long before he’s spilling into her hand. It should feel good, because that is how it’s supposed to feel when Brienne brings him to his peak and kisses him all the while, but this time it _doesn’t_. This time it feels like he’s done something wrong, because he’d taken pleasure from Brienne in a moment like this, a moment that was supposed to be for her and her only. _Gods._ Why had he—it wasn’t fair that he’d— “I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s okay.” She presses her lips to his temple again. “It’s okay.”

“She doesn’t—I don’t think of her, I swear—”

“I know. These things—they come back, sometimes. The things that hurt us before.”

Her words float in the air around them as they make their way to the bathroom. His come had gotten on his jeans, and there’s a little on his shirt too; Brienne has him strip down to his briefs so she can wash out the stains before they settle. He sits, somewhat dazed, on the toilet; watches as she wipes herself, then him, watches as if he is not in his own body. He is hypnotised by the back and forth of her hands as she rinses his clothes at the sink. She is still only in her bra—her panties abandoned on the floor of her room—and there is still the taste of her on his tongue, and there is still some fragment of Cersei in his head and he hates himself for letting it surface.

If only it was a stain he could simply wash out. All those years.

_These things—they come back sometimes._

“Is that what happened?” he asks.

“What?” Brienne replies, still scrubbing.

“Did something come back from before? For you?”

She turns off the tap. “It was stupid,” she says. “It should have been nothing.”

“It’s not nothing if it comes back.”

She hangs his shirt on the back of the door, then his jeans over the towel rail. “I thought I could handle it. On my own.”

“That doesn’t mean… You should tell me anyway. So I can be careful—”

“I don’t _want_ you to be careful,” she cuts him off. “I just—I want to _not care_.”

If only it were that easy, a stain they could simply wash out. “What did I do? That made you care?”

“ _Nothing_. That’s the thing. It shouldn’t be—”

“Brienne.”

She sighs, and pushes the heel of her palm into her forehead. “The other morning, at yours. When I was getting ready—”

He remembers. She was standing at the mirror, just staring at her reflection. Her eyes glazed over, her shoulders tense, her fingers forming fists. He’d noticed her doing that a few times over the past weeks, and this time he thought he should do something, take her mind off whatever it was on. So he’d walked over to her, and wrapped his arms around her waist from behind. He’d pressed his lips to the back of her neck and said:

_For what it’s worth, I think you look beautiful._

She hadn’t replied, so he’d left her to her thoughts, and walked out of the room.

He should have noticed it then—how she’d stiffened in a way she never did in his arms. But he’d dismissed it, thought he’d imagined it, just as he’d dismissed the knit in her brow when she’d come out of his room. He had to run for an appointment, so he’d kissed her on the cheek and left soon after. He should have checked in with her when he’d arrived back in the office that afternoon, but she’d been swept away for a meeting of her own. By the time he began to wonder if something was wrong…

“Was it—should I not have said something?” he asks now. “Should I have left you alone?”

“It wasn’t that. It was—the word you used.”

“What— _beautiful_?”

Brienne flinches as if she’d been struck.

“Is it because you don’t think—”

“No—I mean—yes, but—”

“Because I meant it. You know that I—”

“I know. I know you’ll say things like that and mean them, and I’m trying really hard to believe that you mean them even though I know I’m—”

He can’t help but sigh at that _even though_ , and she turns her head to him sharply. “Sorry,” he mumbles beneath her harsh gaze. “I just—I get that there are things that seem objectively true, or—or words that feel like they only mean one thing…”

“It isn’t—that’s part of it, but it isn’t… They used to call me—”

Now he is the one to look at her sharply. “They?”

She squeezes her eyes shut, and takes a breath. “In high school. And then—university. Some people found out, and…” Another sigh. “ _Brienne the Beauty_ , they called me.”

There is a numbness in Jaime at first, then rage, then guilt for using that word—even though he couldn’t possibly have known—then numbness and rage and guilt again. “Fuck. Fuck, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t. I don’t want you to be.” Her hand reaches for the bathroom counter, grips the edge. “It’s just—I was trying so hard to tell myself it was fine, and that it meant something different coming from you, because it _does_ , but—”

“Things come back.”

She nods, resigned. “Yeah.”

“You could still have told me. I can—I know you wish you didn’t care, but you do, and I could have—”

“I know. I fucked up. It just seemed so stupid, and…”

“It’s _not_. If I could go back in time and find every single person who—”

All of a sudden, he thinks of Hyle Hunt. He hadn’t thought much of Hyle Hunt in recent weeks, but he thinks of Hyle now, of how Hyle had been at university with Brienne, of how he’d overheard Hyle apologising to her all those months ago. Slowly, he says:

“Those people—was one of them… Hyle Hunt?”

To his surprise, Brienne laughs. She covers her face with both hands, and _laughs_ , the kind of laugh that comes when you just have nowhere else for your emotions to go. “It’s worse than that.”

“Worse… how?”

She tells him; struggles through it. She tells him and he wants to punch a hole in her bathroom wall. She tells him how Hyle had seemed different from the rest, how he’d courted her with flowers and gifts. How she’d been flattered, and thought there wasn’t much harm in letting things get a little further, and—and—

_Gods_ , Jaime feels nauseous just thinking of it. He has his hands clasped in front of him, and he is gripping them together so hard that he thinks he might break a bone. Then Brienne says it was all just a part of a _bet_ , and it’s so incredibly cruel that he wants to find whatever cave Hyle Hunt lives in these days and just—

“I punched him,” Brienne says. “When I found out.”

“I can do it again. Ten more times.”

“Jaime.”

“I’ll have him fired.”

“ _Jaime_.”

“Why did you go on those dates with him?” He can’t understand it. “You forgave him after all that?”

She sighs. “It was—he kept asking and—I don’t know. We’d been sleeping together for two months by then, and I was worried that you would—not that I’m blaming you for it or anything, but I just kept thinking you might… I don’t know. Get bored of me.”

“I—” he tries to say, but Brienne holds up a hand.

“It wasn’t just that. I wanted to—to prove to myself that I wasn’t in too deep. That I could go on dates with someone else, since we weren’t supposed to be—since there weren’t supposed to be any strings.”

“I should never have suggested that. I should have—”

“I know,” she says. They’d talked about it a couple of times already, how he’d said it out of desperation, how he thought it was what she’d prefer. “He was—it was fine. I guess I did forgive him, or forgive him enough to do it. And maybe—I don’t know. Maybe I would have let it go on longer. If you hadn’t… reacted the way you did. When I told you.”

Jaime pushes down the memories of that night, all its bad feelings, all its pleasures. “I’m still going to have him fired.”

“And what reason are you going to give your father, exactly?”

“I don’t know. I just feel like I should—do what boyfriends do. Defend your honour.”

He can tell that she’s holding back a smile, and that held-back smile feels like the best thing that’s happened between them in the past three days. “I appreciate that, Jaime, I really do,” she says. “But I’d rather we leave it alone.”

“Fine,” he grunts in response, with more than a little resentment. Brienne walks over to him, warms his cheeks with her hands. He leans through her grasp and towards her, presses his face to her belly, wraps his arms around her thighs.

_Brienne. Brienne only._

“I’m sorry I used that word,” he says into her skin. “Even though I couldn’t have known.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you,” she replies, running her hand through his hair. “That I made you worry.”

“I know you think it’s just your burden to carry, but—”

“I know.”

“I can—”

“I know. But I need to—sometimes I’ll need to… to figure things out in my head first. Sometimes I’ll need you to give me time.”

“Alright. I can do that.”

She tips his head upwards with one hand. “Hey. Speaking of burdens… When you’re ready, we should talk about… what happened just now.”

_About Cersei._

Jaime wraps his arms a little tighter around Brienne, around all of Brienne’s solidity, and thinks she will defend his honour too, when it comes down to it.

“Okay,” he promises. “When I’m ready.”

* * *

**【+1】**

_I love you_ is a strange thought to have when Jaime’s cock is in her mouth.

Stranger still, considering _his_ mouth is on her cunt at the same time.

But the words are unrelenting in her head: _I love you I love you I love you_ , in sync with her movements and his. It’s nonsensical, and she would laugh if she wasn’t otherwise occupied. It’s also _terrifying_ , because it hasn’t even been three months since she was crying on his couch, since he convinced her not to end things between them.

(The terror makes this better, this rhythm they have, with their mouths on each other. The terror has always made it better. It comes in bursts, punctuates; makes her more urgent to seek refuge in Jaime. _What are we doing? Why me? Why you and me together, and what the hell comes next? I don’t know, but you are here, you are still here, and fuck, we were made to be joined like this._

_I love you._ )

It isn’t the act that makes her think of it. It’s not the first time they’ve tried this, so it isn’t some aberration born out of novelty. Maybe it was the events leading up to this moment—here, now, at four in the morning in Jaime’s bed, a bed that she’d secretly come to think of as her own too, at least for half the week. They’d both stayed up far too late for work reasons, far beyond the point of productivity, and they really should have started fucking much sooner than this. That’s their story: _we really should have started fucking much sooner_.

But it isn’t that, either, that makes her say the words in her head. This isn’t from some place of regret. Instead, she thinks it’s the fact that they’d come together so instinctively like this; that they’d known, without speaking, that this was exactly what the other needed. It’s the fact that they were preparing for bed in silence, that they’d met each other’s eyes in silence, that they’d stripped themselves bare in silence before slipping beneath the covers. It’s how she’d reached for his cock at first, then bent her head to it as she pushed the covers off; it’s how he’d run his hand down her lower back and pressed his fingers into her flesh, nudged her even as his breaths grew hot, erratic. She knew what he meant, though they hadn’t done this enough to form habits around it, and they’d metamorphosed without her lips ever leaving him: her swinging one leg over him, him sliding down his pillow to meet her cunt. It’s that too—how they both always seem to _know_ , could draw lines between a touch and an intent, the way Jaime is tracing his fingers along her seam now.

This is love. She can feel it. As sure as the taut muscle of his left thigh, her fingers gripping and kneading it in time with the dips of her head; as sure as his cock, solid and pulsing where her mouth meets her fist. As sure as his tongue, _his tongue, his tongue_ , and her faith that he wouldn’t withdraw it from where she needs it most, except to please her again each time he tastes her folds anew. He’d told her before that he could live between her thighs, but it is she who could live on his tongue alone. Not that she would reduce him to a tongue, or that she would be reduced to the space between her thighs, but that the entire world could be reduced to them together, and feel so much more stable for it.

This is love. This _time_. It is four in the morning, or five, and neither of them has come, or feels anxious to. They don’t need to go anywhere; they don’t need sleep. She strokes, lazily, the soft skin at the base of his cock, cups him like something precious, if only to make him moan into her. That soft vibration makes her smile in turn, as much of a smile as she can manage while travelling the length of him and back. She knows he feels the change in the shape of her mouth, because she can feel the change in the shape of his too, because he locks his lips around her clit and _hums_ into it. Gods, it’s so silly that she almost chokes on him, or perhaps it’s because it feels so blissfully _good_ —humming into her clit, of all possible things—and it is all of it, the silliness and the bliss, the trust, the I-don’t-want-anyone-but-you of it all. She doesn’t want anyone but Jaime, always. This is love.

In the morning—if the sun ever rises—she will tell him. Not now, not right after this. Not because she’s afraid that he won’t say it back; her terror is ebbing, now, in the grazing of her skin against his. Instead, she will delay it because she knows he won’t be able to resist making a joke of it; to reply, _so that’s what it takes for you to say it_ , or something along those lines. He’ll respond in that way because he will never pass up an opportunity to tease, but also because some part of him will wonder. Some voice will whisper to him, _she said those words out of gratitude, not love_. Most of him won’t believe it, but some of him will. This is Jaime, whom she loves—gods, how _wonderful_ —and she will love that doubting part of him too, which means she must tell him those words in the light. And when he says _I love you_ back—he _will_ —she will believe him body and soul. This is Jaime, whom she loves, and who loves her in return. She will not allow herself to question it.

She can sense the familiar shifts in his body now, the throbs, the urge to thrust, the thinning restraint. Most of the time, when she has him in her mouth and he is almost there, he will pull from her, let her wrap her fingers around him so he can find his release that way. But she can feel her own release approaching too, and she _will not move_ , not even when Jaime tries to sink his hips deeper into the mattress and away from her, and especially not when he moves his head back from her cunt to speak. She sinks her own hips against his mouth to silence him, takes him deeper, his tongue and his cock. She hooks her left hand beneath his calf just as he grabs the fronts of her thighs to bring her closer to him, and they will stay entwined like this for two orgasms, twenty.

Then, he stiffens; then there is warmth in the back of her throat. This time, when he throws his head back from her cunt, she doesn’t object. She wants to hear him cry out, hear the pleasure that she’s given him, feel those exhales on her folds. She might come from just this alone, his cries, his breaths, _oh_ , maybe she will, and she grips his calf tighter and he _knows,_ draws a line between a touch and an intent, captures her clit in his mouth again so he can guide her through it. She swallows, or tries to, lifts her head from him so she can gasp, and her hips are thrashing against him and it is _messy_ , but she doesn’t care as much as she might have three months ago because Jaime won’t. _We’re messy people._ He hadn’t meant it in this way, but she thinks of his words as she keens above him, the warmth still making its way down her throat and into her belly. They won’t shy away from any of it, not anymore, not messes like this or the kinds of messes that sit tight and tangled in their chests—yes, _their_ chests, hers and Jaime’s, because she’d described it to him once and he _knew_.

They’re messy people, and this is love.

She collapses, half on top of him, then squeals when she feels a swift lick down her calf to her ankle. He does it for no reason at all, which is the best kind of reason. In retaliation, she runs her finger along his softening cock, wipes up whatever she’d missed with her mouth, then drags a sticky fingertip across his thigh. He lets out something that is half-chuckle and half-shout, and pushes her away; she rolls off him not realising how close she is to the edge of the bed and almost falls right off. She scrambles for the sheets, grabs at Jaime’s leg, and they laugh as he reaches for her and pulls her back just in time. She plants a kiss to his shin in thanks, the hairs on his leg tickling her nose, and he kisses the sole of one foot in reply. They are happy, and this is love.

They should clean up, and sleep. They have work in the morning, the morning that is only a few hours away. They will wake up feeling awful together, reluctant to leave this bed she not-so-secretly thinks of as her own for half the week. She will roll out of bed first, and Jaime will whine and be petulant and say, _It’s not like they can fire me if I waltz in at noon_ ; and she will say, _I don’t enjoy the privileges of Lannisters_ ; and he will say, _You will if I say you do_. She will get mad at him for pulling that card, and she will take him by the wrists and threaten to drag him out of bed, and she will fail because he’ll give her as good as he got. Later, once they’ve disentangled themselves from a heap of laughs and kisses, she will make coffee in the kitchen, the kitchen that she also thinks of as her own for half the week. When he finally emerges from the room, she will hand a cup over to him and say, without fanfare: _I love you_. Just like that. Jaime will freeze, then he will grin, and he will say _I love you too_ , or he’ll take the cup of coffee from her hand and place it on the counter so he can answer her with a kiss. This will be fine, him not saying it back in the moment. She will not allow herself to question it. Because she loves him, she loves him, she loves him, and she believes he loves her in return, body and soul.

This is not a strange thought to have.

This is love.

* * *

**【4】**

“Let’s run away together,” he tells Brienne, as they walk the triple walls of Qarth on the third day of their trip. He has to admit that he’s been enjoying himself more than he expected to, even if the city wasn’t what he had in mind when he suggested they take a break. It was Brienne’s choice: she wanted to go somewhere neither of them had been before, and she’d picked Qarth partly out of interest in its architecture, and partly out of curiosity that a place with only one letter’s difference from Tarth could be so unlike her ancestral island. Jaime still wishes the city was a little more ‘beach’ and a little less ‘port’, but it isn’t one of the great cities of Essos for nothing. It’s making him think of all the other places they could go if they ran away together.

“Isn’t that what we’re doing now?” Brienne replies.

“Not like this. I mean, forever.”

“Forever?” she laughs, adjusting her grip on his hand.

“I’m serious. Let’s quit our jobs at the _Times_ and go freelance. It’ll be our great adventure.”

“What about your father?”

“What _about_ my father?”

“Jaime—”

“No.” He kicks at the sand under his feet. “No Tywin on this trip.”

“So you’re _not_ serious about running away together. Because part of being serious is talking about Tywin.”

She’s right, of course, though he wishes that she wasn’t. “What can he do about it?”

“A lot of things, probably.”

“Alright, fine. But let’s just _assume_ my father won’t be a problem. We’ll be free to wander the known world, and we’ll write great stories along the way, stories that will vanquish terrible evils by revealing nefarious secrets—”

“Are we superheroes in this scenario?” she laughs again. “Or hedge knights?”

“They do say the pen is mightier than the sword,” he quips back.

“For a brilliant journalist, you use far too many clichés.”

Jaime grins, and leans in close to her. “Tell me I’m brilliant again.”

“You’re rich, is what you are.” Brienne elbows him lightly in his ribs. “This is rich-people-talk.”

“Nonsense,” he elbows her back. “There are tons of freelance journalists out there, and they can’t all be rich.”

“But your considerable fortune certainly helps.”

“So do our talents. Dream with me, Brienne.” He stretches out his free arm and draws a line through the air with his hand. “Think of all the stories we will write. And all the sex we will have.”

She heaves a sigh. “Somehow, I knew you were going to bring that up.”

“The _sex_ , Brienne. _Everywhere_.”

“Seven hells,” she mutters, but he knows from her tone that she’s biting back a smile.

“You’re no fun,” he says, just as they emerge from a gateway that leads from the second of Qarth’s walls to the third. “Look at them,” he says, gesturing at the carvings on the wall stretching fifty feet above them. “They’re having fun.”

The lines are faint, eroded by the thousands of years of sun and wind, but he can still see, quite clearly, what the figures are doing with each other. And they _definitely_ look like they’re having fun.

Brienne turns her head towards the wall, and goes bright red when she realises what she’s looking at. “These are very…”

“Instructional?”

“I was going to say _explicit_.”

“That’s exactly why they’re so instructional. Gods, look at that one!” He whips out his phone to snap a picture. “We should try that!”

“Jaime!” she exclaims, clapping a hand over his mouth. “Could you be just a _little_ more respectful?”

He darts out his tongue to lick her hand, and Brienne retracts it with a small yelp. “If they’re carving _this_ ,” he says, as he slips his phone back in his pocket, “I don’t think they really care about respect.”

“I meant,” she wipes her hand on his sleeve, “there are _other people_ around.”

Jaime looks all around them. They aren’t the only ones wandering the walls, sure, but you could hardly call it crowded, and there isn’t anyone within earshot. “I _really_ doubt anyone heard that.”

Brienne looks around too, and grumbles wordlessly when she realises that he’s right. But he doesn’t take the opportunity to rub it in her face like usual, because just then, they pass an entryway that leads into the wall. They’ve walked by a few of these, but there’ve been no signs to tell them what these entryways are or where they lead.

“Hey,” Jaime tugs at Brienne’s hand, “let’s go in. I want to see where this goes.”

“Are you sure we’re allowed to?”

“There isn’t anything telling us we can’t.”

To his disappointment, it’s nothing particularly interesting. They head up a few flights of stairs, which lead to a sort of small landing, with a stone bench built into one side, and a slit of a window looking out into the space between the third wall and the second.

“Some kind of guard post, maybe,” Jaime guesses. “Or a rest area?”

“Maybe. I didn’t even notice these windows from below.” Brienne just manages to stick her head through, and peers down. “There must be someone we can ask.”

“Well, we’re not the only ones who’ve been up here,” he says, running his fingers along the walls where people have carved their own names and crude drawings. “I wonder how old some of these are.”

“What?” She brings her head back through the window, then frowns when she sees what he’s referring to. “I wish people wouldn’t do that,” she sighs disapprovingly. “What could they possibly get out of it?”

If she is waiting for an answer, Jaime is too distracted to give it right now. He’s distracted because he’s looking down at the bench. Because an idea is forming in his head.

“No,” he hears Brienne say. “Do not even—”

“Did I say anything?” he asks innocently.

“I know what you’re thinking.”

“It’s perfect.”

“It is _not_ perfect.”

He runs a hand over the bench. Not that dusty at all. “I could sit—”

“ _No._ ”

“No one can see us. Or hear us, if we’re quiet.”

“ _Jaime._ Anyone could come up here.”

“Why would they?”

“Why did _we_?”

“Because we’re adventurers.” He sticks his head through the window just as Brienne had done just now, and watches the people below stroll by. “No one else seems interested. And we can be quick.”

When he doesn’t hear any reply, he turns back around to see her biting her lip. “You’re considering it,” he smirks.

“Shut up.”

“Come on. It’ll be an adventure.”

“Will you stop with the—how am I going to enjoy this _adventure_ if I’m spending the whole time worrying about getting caught?”

“It’s not like we haven’t—in fact, it’s probably _less_ risky than fucking in a supply closet.”

Her eyes flash. “You do _not_ get to use _that_ to justify _this_.”

“Oh, I’m using it,” he taunts, moving closer to her. “Especially since we didn’t only do it the one time.”

“The supply closet has a _door_. That can be _locked_.”

“We’re practically three floors up. We’ll hear if anyone is coming up the stairs.”

He’s wearing her down, he can tell. He can hear it in the way her breaths have quickened. He moves closer, and closer, until Brienne backs against the wall. He puts one hand on the stone just by her ear, while the other teases the collar of her button-up shirt, which she’s wearing loose over a tank top and no bra. He knows she’s not wearing a bra because he’d watched her get ready this morning, and even if that had been some kind of hallucination, he can see now that her nipples are pebbling through the fabric. His hand travels down from her collar to her breast, and when he runs a thumb over one nipple, she sucks in a breath.

“Yes?” he asks, hooking two fingers into her tank top and pulling downwards.

She groans. “Yes, alright, make it quick.”

It’s not the most arousing way to start things off, but Jaime isn’t going to jeopardise a yes by opening his mouth. In any case, his mouth is currently busy with other things, like capturing the nipple that had betrayed her desire. Then it travels to her neck, then her lips, then her ear, then all the way back to her nipple again. But it’s growing increasingly clear that while his spirit is eager, his body isn’t being quite so obedient—at least, not where it matters most—and ‘making it quick’ is becoming more challenging by the second.

“Help,” he pleads with Brienne, and points downwards.

“So much for being adventurous,” she sighs as she unzips him.

“You could argue that this is _more_ —” and he would complete the sentence if she hadn’t pushed him onto the bench just then. But she had, and now she’s kneeling before him, and then it’s a flurry of lips and tongue and fingers and _damn it, Jaime_ , and _I’m trying, you think I want this to—fuck, there, right there_ , and _oh_ , thank the Seven, and thank Brienne twice as much, and thank all the sex they’ve had in the past year, even that first time in the supply closet that he’s so glad wasn’t their last time. And then she’s attempting to straddle him and trying to figure out how to get all her clothes out of the way in order to do that, so if there’s any sound that will give them away it’ll be the laughing and the cursing, and then she stops and says:

“Wait—why am I—” and then she laughs again, and turns around and backs into his lap instead, and it only takes a second before he’s inside her, and he’s thanking the Seven once more, and he’s telling her that she’s wetter than she’s ever been, and she’s saying _it’s because someone decided to take too fucking long_ , and then they freeze—

but it was nothing, maybe the wind, maybe some strange overlap of their breaths, thank the Seven, because he thinks he’d rather die than stop now. And it’s going well, at first, they get a good rhythm going, then he realises he’s close _already_ , fuck, how is that even possible?

“I’m… I’m almost there,” he gasps.

“ _Seriously?_ ”

“ _Ah_ —seriously. You?”

“Nowhere— _ah_ —near.”

So now he’s wrapping one arm around her, and in her desperation to lean into his touch she almost topples over, and then she clutches at him and _he_ almost topples over, and now he’s reaching blindly for her clit and if he didn’t know her body so well he might not have found it, but he can’t _see_ so he only knows he found it because she takes a huge gulp of air that is so loud she might as well have cried out. She knows that she was too loud, and he knows that she knows because _there it is_ , her embarrassment, blooming on her skin as the most glorious of blushes, spreading even to the back of her neck where Jaime can press his lips to it just to feel the heat of her, and she _arches_.

He lasts a while longer after that, longer than he thought he would, but he still comes far sooner than he’d hoped. To atone for it, he stays inside her as long as he can, working furiously with his fingers, and now it’s his turn to say _damn it, Brienne_ , because it’s just one of those times when she’s _stuck_ , why _now_? She’s gripping his thighs and trying to push her hips backwards and forwards at the same time—backwards into his softening cock and forwards into the frantic movements of his hand—and she’s struggling so hard to be _quiet_ , her exhales and her grunts, and maybe that’s why she’s stuck, because her sounds have nowhere to go, so when he can tell that she’s close enough to the edge he takes his hand from between her thighs, and she makes to grab for it but he’s cupping it over her lips, letting her taste herself on his fingers, letting her muffle her moans in his palm, her moans that are sometimes his name. He whispers in her ear, _come for me_ , over and over again, like he’s been telling her since the very first time he was inside her, until finally, _finally,_

_there it is._

Gods. Talk about an adventure.

“That was—” she pants, hanging her head. “Fuck—I’m worn out.” Then, she smacks him on his arm. “You made me… do all the—the work.”

“I got you there in the end, didn’t I?”

Slowly, she climbs off him. “Seven hells. Carry—carry me back to our hotel.”

He has to smile; the Brienne of six months ago wouldn’t have even thought that was possible, let alone dared to ask. “I would if I thought you were serious.”

“I’m very close to being serious.” She wobbles a little on her feet, her panties and jeans still pooled at her ankles. “If we’re doing this again tonight, I’m not doing _any_ moving.”

“As you wish, my lady,” he says solemnly, and bows, which is an absurd thing to do when his cock is still hanging out of his fly. But it makes Brienne snort, so it was entirely worth it, and then Jaime has a thought—and hells, perhaps this is absurd too, but he thinks he wants to hear that snort always, that and all the other ways in which he makes her laugh. Shyly, and exasperatedly, and uncontrollably, at every possible time of the day—he doesn’t want to miss a single moment of it. This absurd thought stays with him the whole way back to their hotel, and the whole time he leaves Brienne to soak in the bath when they return, while he heads to the pool to swim a few leisurely laps. It is still with him when they head out to the balcony with a bottle of Arbor gold, when he pours each of them a glass that seems to glow orange in the sunset, when she settles into his side on the chaise with his arm around her shoulder. He thinks, perhaps, that he should speak this thought out loud—just so she’ll know. But it doesn’t come out how he expects. Instead, it comes out like this:

“Move in with me.”

Softly, she says, “What did you say?”

“Move in with me,” he repeats, looking into her eyes, eyes he wants to look into always. “You’re already at mine most of the week. Move in with me.”

She glances down, away from him, and he’d be hurt if he couldn’t see the small smile dancing on her lips. “I thought you wanted to run away,” she murmurs, swirling her wine in her glass.

He places his own glass on the small table next to the chaise, then reaches for her chin to tilt her head back up to him. “It’s the same thing, isn’t it?” He leans in for one kiss. “You and me, together. Writing stories.”

This time, her smile is brighter, wider. “Will this be our great adventure, Jaime Lannister?”

“Only one of many, many, many adventures, Brienne Tarth.” He takes her glass from her hand, and places it on the table too. “Great ones, and tiny ones, and medium-sized ones too.”

She laughs— _good_ , this was the point, to hear her laugh always—and winds her arm around his waist. “We’ve had quite a few already, haven’t we?”

“We have. Are you worn out, rookie?”

“Gods, it’s been a while since you called me that.”

“It has.” He sticks out his tongue. “Feels weird.”

“ _Sounds_ weird,” she laughs again.

“So…” He slips his arm under hers and around her waist too, mirroring her arm around his. “Is this a yes?”

A brief pause, a pause that also feels like an age, then—

“Yes.” She nestles her cheek against his chest. “Okay. Let’s move in together.”

* * *

**【5+】**

The subject comes up in the most innocuous of ways—which is to say, it catches Brienne completely unawares. It shouldn’t have, because it’s been almost a year since they’ve been together officially—making it almost half since she moved into his apartment—so even if they hadn’t actually gotten around to talking about it, she really should have given it some thought by now. The most she’d done, though, was let the subject cross her mind once in a while. It was the most she’d done with a couple of related subjects too, the kinds of subjects that _should_ be talked about when things are going pretty well between two people. But they’re also two people who’d stumbled into this relationship, who’d gotten tangled up in each other long before either of them would admit it out loud. They’ve worked on communicating, they really have, and they’re getting better and better at it every day, but sometimes—

Sometimes, it’s just so much easier to fuck than to talk about things.

It’s been that way between them from the start, and she suspects it’ll be that way for as long as they’re together. Even if they’d promised that they’d talk to each other—even if they know that fucking won’t make things better if they don’t talk to each other too—sometimes they just can’t help but choose the path of least resistance.

And fucking is almost always the path of least resistance.

It’s not that talking is that difficult, really. It isn’t so bad when they agree on things, and they’ve found that they do agree on most things, once they see past the petty resentments and past traumas that occasionally get in the way. She’s learned how to trust Jaime with her secrets, just as he’s trusted her with his since the start; he’s learned, slowly, how to give her space when she needs it, and how to take space for himself too.

So it’s not that talking is that difficult, really. It isn’t so bad when it gets them closer to some form of understanding. It’s the other kind of talking—the kind that only makes the issue seem even more irresolvable…

That’s what Brienne is afraid of, when it comes to this subject. That’s why she’s delayed talking about it for so long. And that’s how it catches her completely unawares—which is to say, she’s pushed the subject far, far, far into a corner of her mind and isn’t prepared for it to come up when Jaime asks her a seemingly innocuous question one evening.

“What’s his name again?” he asks, pointing at the man who’s just come up on the TV screen. “Duncan, right?”

“I think so.” She reaches into the gigantic bowl of extra buttery popcorn in Jaime’s arms, which he’d just finished preparing when she’d arrived home, exhausted, after a long day of chasing leads that seemed to go nowhere. The man that she thinks is named Duncan is a side character on a show they only casually watch, and she’s surprised she remembers his name given that she’s lost track of his plotline completely.

“Hmm.” Jaime crunches on what sounds like an entire handful of popcorn all at once, and says something that sounds like: “That’s a good name, don’t you think?”

“A good name for what?”

“A—well, a person.”

He’s being suspiciously tongue-tied—or perhaps it’s just because his mouth is still half stuffed with popcorn. “Is this for a pseudonym or something?” she asks, then turns to him and grabs his arm. “Is this—are you on to something big with the—”

“No.” He swallows the last bit of popcorn. “No, I haven’t gotten any good leads for that yet.”

“I’m in the same boat,” she sighs, loosening her grip. “So what’s this about?”

Jaime reaches for the remote, awkwardly muting the TV with his non-buttery fingers. “Well—I was just—I was thinking it might be a good name for… for a kid.”

“What kid?” she frowns.

“A… hypothetical… male… child.”

“You’re writing fiction now?”

“No!” It’s Jaime’s turn to sigh this time, and he unmutes the TV. “Never mind.”

She grabs the remote from him and mutes the TV again. “Don’t _never mind_ me. What is this— _oh_.”

_Oh. He’s talking about—_

“Took you long enough,” Jaime grumbles, grabbing another handful of popcorn.

_Oh._

She must have been silent for a while, because Jaime is waving his popcorn-filled hand in front of her face. “Hello? Are you there?”

“Yeah. I’m here. I just—I didn’t expect you to bring it up.”

“I was trying to ease you into it. Just to get a—a sense of where you stand.”

She exhales, and sinks deeper into the couch. “It’s been a really long day. Can we discuss this some other time?”

“I’m not—” He grimaces. “I didn’t mean to get into the _logistics_ of it. I just wanted to know whether it’s a yes or a no. That’s all.”

His voice had cracked when he’d said _no_ , which tells her all she needs to know about where _he_ stands on the subject. She’d thought as much; seen it in his eyes when they passed families on the street; ignored it, perhaps, until now. But this had always seemed like a discussion to be had far into the future, because—

“Jaime. We haven’t even talked about—” Brienne lowers her voice to a whisper. “ _Marriage._ ”

He turns, and stares at her. “You _don’t_ want to get married?”

“No! I mean, I suppose I do want to, at some point in the next couple of years. Assuming we…”

Jaime’s eyes widen in alarm. “Assuming we…?”

“We can’t… know what will happen. Right? Sometimes, things just…” and his eyes are widening even more, so she scrambles to say, “I’m not saying things _won’t_ work out.”

“You better not be. Unless, there’s something you want to—”

“No. No, things have been… good.” Really good, actually. Better than expected, despite how messy it had been at the start, and how messy it still gets sometimes. And then she thinks of how much messier it could get if—

“Fine,” Jaime replies. “ _Assuming_ things work out, you’ll want to get married at some point in the next couple of years. Me too.” He tosses a kernel into his mouth, chews, swallows. “So now we’ve talked about it.”

She narrows her eyes at him. “You know that isn’t the end of the discussion.”

“I told you, I just need to know where you stand on these things. Details, later.”

“Sometimes—” Brienne takes a kernel, and rolls it between her thumb and index finger. “Sometimes, it’s the details that determine the decision. It’s not just a matter of a yes or a no.”

“Are we back to the other subject now?”

She nods.

“Okay. So you have… conditions.”

“Con _cerns_ ,” she corrects. “Our work—it takes up so much time and energy. But I won’t want to stop doing what I do, and I… I don’t think you’d want to do that either.”

“Other people manage, right? They get help, and they manage.”

“I guess. I just—I would want to be present, you know?” She thinks of the months they spent on the Sansa Stark story, of _how_ they spent those months. The late nights, the travel, the unpredictability, the sometimes dangerous situations they found themselves in. “And I don’t know how present we can be when we’re—”

“We’ll figure it out.” He’s still grasping his fistful of popcorn, and the kernels rustle against each other in his hand. “We’ll find a balance, and make accommodations, and—”

“It’s all well and good to _say_ we’ll do these things, but—”

“Look,” he sighs. “If it’s a no, just say so. Don’t make it out to be—”

He stops himself before he can finish the sentence, and mumbles a _sorry_. But she’d already heard the annoyance in his tone, seen it in the furrow of his brow.

“I’m not _making it out to be_ anything,” she snaps, the annoyance bubbling inside her too. “I’m being _realistic_. This is another human being we’re talking about.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“I think you’re not acknowledging how difficult it’s going to be.”

“I just—” He releases the popcorn, finally, into the side of the bowl, which somehow makes her even more annoyed. “I don’t see why we can’t commit to a decision and, and work _towards_ it. I’m not saying the part that comes after _won’t_ be difficult, but if we both want it enough, then—”

“ _Wanting_ doesn’t make things magically work out.”

“Of course it doesn’t, but if you won’t even—” He laughs, short and bitter. “You _always_ do this.”

She whips her head towards him. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“You can’t ever just— _say_ whether you want something or not.”

“I told you, I’m not saying _no_ —”

“And by the time you say _yes_ , it would have taken so much effort to convince you that I wouldn’t know if you wanted it in the first place.”

“That isn’t fair,” she says, sucking in a breath.

“Isn’t it?”

The annoyance is swelling in Brienne’s lungs now, coagulating with all the frustration and fatigue of the day. It feels like it’s being pushed up her windpipe, accumulating in her throat in the form of words she knows she’ll regret saying. So, she doesn’t say them. She stands instead, and there are the beginnings of some protest from Jaime, but she walks away. A few steps later, she hears the sounds of the TV, unmuted again; she doesn’t look back. Just heads straight for the bathroom, where she will take a long shower, alone. She will run through all the things she wants to say to Jaime, which might also be things she shouldn’t say, which is why she will think them beneath the running water so that they can flow silently out of her mouth and into the shower drain.

She’s already locked the door when she realises that the kernel of popcorn is still between her fingers.

(They fuck, still, later. They almost always do, even at times like this. He joins her in bed—she can still smell the butter on him—and when he snakes his arm around her waist and surges up to kiss her roughly, she welcomes it. When pushes himself into her, then withdraws and thrusts into her harder, faster, she welcomes it. She sinks her teeth into his shoulder in response, digs her nails into his back, and he welcomes it.

Sometimes, it’s just so much easier to fuck than to talk about things.

She lets Jaime come inside her, imagines what might happen if they weren’t taking other precautions. Imagines what could still happen, if they were just that unlucky.

Jaime might not think of it as unlucky.)

The morning after—the worst of the bad feelings dissolving, more or less, after a night’s rest—Brienne apologises to Jaime for leaving the conversation the way she did. He apologises, too, for springing the subject on her, and for choosing a bad time; she reminds him again that it isn’t a no, and he nods. There is no time to speak now, though—and no inclination—so they don’t. When Jaime sits up, she can see a faint bite mark on his shoulder, and a few small crescents on his back. She apologises for those too, but this time he shakes his head, reaches over to the tender spot on her neck where she remembers he’d latched onto last night. This is what they do to each other, sometimes. Mark each other. She thinks they will stay marked by each other even if things don’t work out between them. She’s not saying that things won’t, she really isn’t. All she’s saying is this: Jaime feels like forever, no matter what the future holds.

It takes them more than a week to dive back into the discussion. It’s a busy few days, and it’s avoidance, too, but it gives her some time to reflect on the words they exchanged that night, and the words that they didn’t. Then there are breakthroughs for both of their stories, and suddenly it feels like some tension has lifted between them. So they open a bottle of Dornish red, just as they’d done on the very first night they’d fucked, and they sit across from each other at the dining table. It’s as if they’re negotiating the terms of a contract—and in a sense, perhaps they are. Perhaps it’s what they should have done back in the day, back when Jaime had said that there didn’t need to be any strings.

Then again, she wonders if they would be together now, if they had done it that way. Perhaps there was something in those months of silence, that lack of any real definition to their arrangement, that made space for their feelings to grow.

That isn’t how they can deal with this subject, though.

“I had this… ideal in my head,” Jaime begins, before she can contemplate that thought any further. “A fantasy, maybe. That you’d tell me you’d want a family with me, and all that.”

“I know.” She pinches the stem of her wine glass, the way she’d pinched that kernel of popcorn that night. “I just—I need time to work through these things. You know this. It doesn’t necessarily mean I don’t want the same things you want.”

He takes a measured sip of his wine, puts the glass down slowly. “I guess I assumed you might have already given it some thought,” he says. “That you would have, if you really wanted it.”

She sighs. “I never dared to, I think.”

“Because we hadn’t talked about marriage?”

“Maybe. But also—I don’t know. I think I was afraid of the answers I would find.”

“What do you mean?” Jaime frowns.

It’s her turn to take a sip now; two; three. “For a long time—before you—my work was… it’s what I built my life around. So in a way, I think I could have lived without ever having a child, you know? Because I’d never really expected to.” Another sip. “And maybe you’d call that wanting it _less_ , but… I don’t know if it’s genuinely because I put my career first, or—or because I’ve taught myself not to want things like that. A marriage. A family.”

“Love?”

“Love,” she nods, looking down to where she’d hooked a finger on the edge of the table. “Anyway. Whatever the reason, I can’t deny that I—I probably don’t feel as strongly about having kids as you do. Not enough to give up on my work.”

“I’m not asking you to do that.”

“I know. But there’ll be times when—when I’ll have to make choices. Between work and family. And I’m not saying I’ll choose one or the other every time, but—I think I need a sort of scaffolding, I guess you could call it.”

Jaime nods. “That’s fair. I probably need one too.”

“Really?” she asks, meeting his eyes.

“Is that surprising?”

“I was—that night, you seemed so sure that everything would work out. And so—” She leans one elbow onto the table, and rests her chin on her palm. “I think, one of the answers I was afraid of—it was how you responded that night.”

“I’m sorry—”

She shakes her head. “It’s fine. I just meant—I didn’t want you to feel… disappointed in me.”

“I’m not—” He exhales. “I was disappointed by the answer, but I wasn’t disappointed _in you_. And I only felt that way because I had certain hopes for how the conversation would go. When it didn’t…”

“I wish that I could—”

“No, I didn’t mean—”

“I know, but I still—I do wish it. That I could just say that I want things, and do them. I can, when it’s work, but for the rest of it…”

One corner of Jaime’s lips turns upwards. “If you’d been able to do that, I think we’d have started fucking a lot sooner.”

“I don’t know about that,” she says, giving him a half smile of her own. “I don’t think I knew that I wanted you until our first time. Not in the way where I’d actually _get_ you.”

“Well, you did.”

“I did.”

He reaches across the table, and she removes her palm from under her chin to take his hand. “We’ll be in this together, you know,” he says. “If we really went freelance, we could write the things we want to write, _when_ we want to write them. Or we work things out with the _Times_ —whatever we think will be best. But we’re in this together.”

“I guess I’m just—I worry. That we’ll make some irreversible decision that will, I don’t know, scar our child, or ruin a really important story, or—or _both_.”

“We might. And we might not be able to prepare for those things.”

“That is _not_ reassuring,” she says, giving his hand a slight tug.

“No, it isn’t. I just don’t think it’s a reason not to try. We weren’t really prepared for each other, were we?”

She takes her lower lip between her teeth, nods.

“Do you think—” Jaime says, tentatively, “do you think maybe you’re putting all this pressure on Future You to… to be a perfect mother? And that’s part of what’s making it so terrifying?”

“Maybe,” she murmurs. “Maybe part of it is—I barely remember my mother.”

“Me too. And my father was… _is_ …”

“Yeah. My father—I think he did his best, but… I just feel so—so _ill-equipped_.” She squeezes Jaime’s hand. “How do you—get over that?”

“I’m not saying I’m _not_ terrified,” he shrugs. “But I can’t possibly do worse than Tywin Lannister, right?”

“I don’t think you have that in you, no,” Brienne laughs.

“And I have you. I trust you. You’ve dealt with my shit better than anyone else has, so—I think you’ll be a better mother than you think.”

She smiles. “Are you voluntarily comparing yourself with a _child_ , Jaime?”

“I know I act like one,” he grins back. “Sometimes.”

“A lot of the time.”

“ _Sometimes_.” He releases her hand, gets up from his chair, then rounds the table till he’s standing right next to her. “We’ll do good, I think. The two of us.”

She leans into him, her head nestled into his side. “Even though we’re messy people?”

“Even though we’re messy people, who’ll screw up like messy people do. We’ve always—we do right by each other in the end, don’t we?”

“Yeah.” Absently, she fingers the edge of his t-shirt. “Sometimes it takes a few months, though.”

“Well, we’ll try not to inflict that on our kids.”

“Kid,” she interjects, looking up at him. “ _Singular_.”

Jaime tips his head to the side. “We’ll have to start with one, I suppose. Though I can’t say I wasn’t hoping for two, at least.”

“Two, at _most_.”

“Fine,” he concedes, with a look that suggests he’s planning on persuading her otherwise. Then, he lifts his hand to her cheek, and brushes her hair behind her ear. “There _is_ one detail I’d like to talk about soon.”

“Oh, so when it’s _your_ details, you want to talk about it, but when it’s _mine_ , you’re all, ‘I just want you to say yes or no!’”

He winces. “I deserved that.”

“You did,” she says, prodding him in his thigh. “So, what’s your detail?”

“I’m not saying we have to talk about this _now_ , but I’d like to… have a discussion about… _when_.”

“Oh, we are _definitely_ not talking about this now,” she replies, pulling back from him.

“Okay, but listen—I’m—” and then he bends down a little and whispers: “ _Getting old._ ”

Brienne laughs. She stops herself as soon as she can, but she’d _laughed_ , and it was _loud_.

“First off,” he pouts, “your response should have been, _you’re not getting old, Jaime_.”

“I’m sorry. You’re not—”

“Too late.”

She stands from her chair too, takes his hand. “Alright,” she says, giving him a kiss on the cheek. “We can put a timeline on the agenda.”

“Mm.” He kisses her back on the lips this time. “I love it when you talk dirty to me.”

“Oh gods,” she says, rolling her eyes and trying not to smile. “We just had a _Very Serious Talk_ , Jaime.”

“And now we get to _Have Sex_ , Brienne.”

“Oh—really?” she gasps—he’s already kissing his way towards her neck. “We’re not going to— _oh_ —fuck?”

She can feel him smile into her shoulder. “We can, if you like.” Then, he brings his lips close to her ear and says: “Unless you’d like to _fornicate_.”

“No, thank you,” she giggles. “But could I interest you in a round of _intercourse_?”

“If we _must_ ,” he sighs, as he pushes her t-shirt up past her navel and rests his hand on her belly. “Or… we could always _make love_.”

She doesn’t hate the phrase as much as she used to, but she finds it lacking for a different reason now. _It puts a lot of pressure on the act_ , she’d told Jaime before; now it just seems… imprecise. Incongruous, even, with what happens when their bodies come together. Why would they bother making something that they already have?

“No,” she says, weaving her arms around him. “I don’t think there’s any need for that.”

**Author's Note:**

> “Brienne not being able to tell Jaime she loves him because they’re 69ing and the whole sequence having no real dialogue because it's the ‘one time they don't talk about words’” is quite possibly my favourite thing I’ve ever written. Besides that, it’s been an interesting challenge for me to take elements from my other established relationship fics (especially Office AU) and pivot them for the JB of this verse.
> 
> Thanks to [Roccolinde](https://archiveofourown.org/users/roccolinde) and [jencat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jencat) for the handholding as always!


End file.
